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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T130000
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DTSTAMP:20260424T181618
CREATED:20260217T222743Z
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SUMMARY:Shields\, S. (CM) - Procedural\, Player-Centric Game Balancing
DESCRIPTION:Game balance is a term widely used among players\, researchers\, and designers of games. It is a concept that feels vitally important to how we make and play games – but when we try to define it or implement it\, we seldom get the same definition twice. Balance appears differently to whoever is judging it\, but as researchers and designers we still must translate this element of game design into technical practice. It also is an expensive and time-consuming subject\, one that requires a constant loop of playtesting and design iteration through nearly the entirety of the game development process. \nThis work seeks to focus our understanding of balance while offering procedural methods to either increase speed or improve quality when performing balancing tasks in game design and research. It accomplishes this by offering a taxonomy of balance alongside a generic design framework that can be used to apply balancing strategies to any game context. It additionally provides a catalog of balancing methods\, allowing designers to use common patterns to apply procedural balancing to their games. Finally\, I offer three technical examples using the taxonomy and framework\, putting theoretical knowledge of balance into concrete technical systems. \nBalance ultimately helps us design games that make us feel fairness in our play. By sharpening and optimizing our understanding of the term\, we improve the games we make and open new doors in game systems design. \nEvent Host: Sam Shields\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computational Media  \nAdvisor: Edward F. Melcer \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98956788669?pwd=ao7DzYQebCeS3SJ4PsGaZeGYhYMVNI.1 \nPasscode- 713173
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/shields-s-cm-procedural-player-centric-game-balancing/
LOCATION:Merrill College\, College Office\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260305T130000
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SUMMARY:Xu\, Y. (CSE) - Right Place\, Right Time: Accelerating Edge Computation on Modern Heterogeneous SoCs
DESCRIPTION:Modern edge computing increasingly relies on heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. These chips tightly integrate general-purpose CPUs with various specialized accelerators\, including GPUs\, FPGAs\, and AI accelerators\, all under a shared memory architecture. Although these shared-memory SoCs enable more efficient communication and data sharing between different processing units\, they are notoriously difficult to program and tune due to architectural diversity across vendors and asymmetric compute capabilities within each SoC. \nThis dissertation introduces Redwood and BetterTogether\, two frameworks that rethink CPU-accelerator collaboration on heterogeneous SoCs. Redwood targets a class of algorithms termed traverse–compute\, that combine irregular tree traversals with dense leaf-level computation\, e.g.\, Nearest-Neighbor Search and Barnes–Hut algorithm. \nIt addresses the efficient mapping of these algorithms onto heterogeneous systems by exploiting the architectural strengths of CPUs\, GPUs\, and FPGAs. BetterTogether extends this methodology to a different class of edge workloads\, specifically multi-stage pipelines and neural networks commonly used in computer vision tasks. Furthermore\, it introduces interference-aware analysis and scheduling techniques tailored for mobile SoCs. Finally\, to broaden the scope of heterogeneous acceleration\, we evaluated emerging domain-specific accelerators. We provide a preliminary analysis of Tensor Processing Units and Tensor Cores within the context of modern programming abstractions. \nEvent Host: Yanwen Xu\, Ph.D. Candidate\, Computer Science and Engineering \nAdvisor: Tyler Sorensen \nZoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5354629158?pwd=0CVhbwLuXDMX5fAGZd63tcfNqDWp0t.1 \nPasscode- 114514
URL:https://events.ucsc.edu/event/xu-y-cse-right-place-right-time-accelerating-edge-computation-on-modern-heterogeneous-socs/
LOCATION:Engineering 2\, Engineering 2 1156 High Street\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064
CATEGORIES:Ph.D. Presentations
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